Facebook Connect to help claim more internet real estate

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Facebook is looking to reach beyond its pages with the launch of a new idea that will allow users to log on to external sites with their same social networking credentials.

Facebook Connect will launch on Digg, Hulu, Geni, the Discovery Channel and San Francisco Chronicle and will mean that all your mates will know about your activities on those sites, as you will your mates activities with the same companies. Capiche?

Not abundantly clear, but it seems that soon logging in with your Facebook details on other sites will become as ubiquitous as seeing PayPal fields popping up all over the web. There’s a demo here.

If it works, it’s a stroke of genius. Advertising on social networks is at the pitiful end of the scale but once that information is on other more specific parts of the web, then the marketing job is much simpler. It’s much easier to work out which adverts to throw at you if you’re logged onto Hulu and they know your taste in film and TV. Theses other sites will be getting the full benefit of that juicy Facebook database

Of course, this sends off all sorts of data protection alarms in the heads of the paranoid and the fairly sensible too, but I’m sure Connect will be an opt in service. They don’t want another Beacon on their hands. Right?

Right, so In return Connect could open up a whole new network of roads for Facebook and quite probably put the nail in the coffin of a lot of its competitors too. Not bad.